As the director of the Office of Advocacy for New York City’s foster care system, Dana Guyet works closely with parents. She facilitates the Administration for Children’s Services Parent Advisory Workgroup, whose mission is to bring together advocates for parents from across the system to give feedback to the commissioner about system change. Here Guyet describes the impact of the Workgroup on her thinking and on the system:

It’s not brand new for me to work with parents. I worked closely with youth in care and their families. But it’s different to work with birth parents as colleagues. That made the job sound interesting to me.

Informing the Commissioner

There’s about 60 parent advocates working at different agencies in the New York City foster care system, and about 10-15 members who attend monthly meetings of the Workgroup. The Workgroup also meets with Commissioner John Mattingly for two hours every three months. They tell him about issues they’re seeing in their work and how they think the system could respond.

Right now, one thing the parent advocates feel strongly about is introducing legislation that would provide financial supports for guardians. When a parent is having trouble, family members often want to step in and become the childrens’ guardians but sometimes can’t afford to. Many states allow guardians to get financial supports so kids don’t come into the foster care system unnecessarily. Some kinship foster care placements might be avoided if we offered subsidized guardianship, but in New York, we don’t offer that option. We think New York should create subsidized guardianships and we’d like to present that to the legislature, so we spoke to the commissioner about that.

Celebrating Parents

The Workgroup also celebrates the work of parent advocates and of parents who succeed in reunifying with their children. In June we had a reception to honor all of the parent advocates. The event showed how much we value parent involvement in the system.

The Workgroup also started Family Fun Day, a yearly event to acknowledge and celebrate reunifying families. This year, our second, about 2,000 people attended. We had a main stage with music, gave out straw hats and bandannas (“country” was the theme), and held a pie-eating contest, water balloon toss, three-legged races, and other activities like that. While it was mainly about having fun, we also had a community resource area where parents could find information.

The parent advocates are very aware of what families need and what’s going on at the ground level. I’ve always tried to take a more progressive view of how we can work with families, but the parents have more direct knowledge about their community, clients and cultures. On a regular basis they point something out new.

‘Our Discussions Make Me Think’

Just recently the Workgroup was talking about how involvement with the child welfare system affects families long after they’re done with the system. Children are getting mixed messages about what it means for the parents to be the authority figure.

Our discussion really made me think about how damaging it can be for children who are just learning how to manipulate their world to develop the idea that it’s a natural relationship for the system to be involved in their families. It came home to me how hard that can be for the parents for them to say, “I’m the parent, you have to do this, this is your punishment,” with the child saying, “I can call ACS.”

We definitely want kids to be safe, and to reach out if something bad is happening, but we don’t want our role to have a negative impact on a family’s development, where the parents feel like they can’t be in control. I wondered, “How do we translate that into the work we’re doing? When a family has gone through a crisis or trauma, and a separation or investigation, how do we heal the wounds?”

The Workgroup is a reminder to me and to the people I work with of the impact our policies have. I bring their perspective to meetings I’m a part of and to my work in the Office of Advocacy.